The year before, in 1929, leukemia fetched Grandmother to lie beside her unmarked son: a simple Vermont granite stone, lettered by the new sandblasting process that was killing the family’s business with easy competition, identifies her grave. Karl suddenly moved out of house and town to lay bricks in Baltimore. Konrad, Rose, and their Easter egg reinstalled themselves, to help everyone deal with Hector’s growing rages. The nation’s economy collapsed. So must the Mensch Memorial Monument Company without Karl’s foremanship: its founder widowed, weary, and deprived of his income from the immigration business; its angel risen to the company of Michael and the others; its mortal mainstay trying in vain to carve high-relief portraits with a left-handed sandblaster, and approaching madness as Ambrose approached birth.
Upon his “cure” and discharge in 1931 from the Eastern Shore Asylum, Hector mounted at his dead twin’s head an unlettered, unpolished, rough-cut stone fresh from the packing case as in the old days, reasoning nicely that unfinished marble was more in keeping anyhow with Wilhelm’s terminal aesthetics. Konrad compared it to the Miller’s Grave in Old Trinity Churchyard at Church Creek, marked by a pair of uninscribed millstones.
Having laid waste without success, en route to this insight, a deal of granite and alabaster, Hector now turned like Bellerophon to laying waste his soul instead, and succeeded quite. He had become principal of Dorset High before his twin obsessions and nine-month “commitment” led to his suspension. Not even Andrea held his jealous furies against him, once they passed; all assumed it was the celebrated “twin business” had deranged him, with which the whole town sympathized. Karl’s exit, nearly everyone agreed, was merely diplomatic; he would return when Hector was himself again, and Hector would reestablish himself with the school board, which had charitably arranged an unpaid furlough instead of accepting his resignation. In the meanwhile — and more, one feels, from the frustration of his sculpting than from his passing certainty that he was not his new son’s father — Hector turned, not to alcohol or opium, but to acerbity, dour silence, and melancholia, scarcely less poisonous in the long run; and to business, which, whether or not one has a head for it, may be addictive as morphine, and as deleterious to the moral fiber. To the summer of his death, even after the manpower shortage of World War II returned him to the principalship of Dorset High, Hector’s passion turned from the firm back to his brother’s beloved marble, and back to the firm again; and he ruined both, but would abandon neither.
Yet most obstinate of all is brother Peter, because more single-minded. Not that he resembles the family (excepting Karl) in other respects. Short and thick where they are tall and lean, black and curly where they are blond and straight, slow of wit, speech, movement where they are quick, devoid equally of humor and its sister, guile — how did the genes that fashion Mensches fashion him? As probable as that a potato should sprout on their scuppernong arbor, or that the wisteria, gorgeous strangler of their porch, should give out one May a single rose.
“Our foundling,” Andrea called him, before such jokes lost their humor. And wouldn’t he stammer when that lovely indolent bade him sit and talk upon the couch whence she directed the Menschhaus! Wouldn’t he redden when she questioned him with a smile about imaginary girl friends! Go giddy at the smell of lilac powder and cologne (which Ambrose can summon to his nostrils yet), and at the kiss-cool silk of her robe! And if, best sport of all, she held his head against her breast, stroked those curls so blacker by contrast, and sang in her unmelodious croon “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” wouldn’t the tears come! Aunt Rosa would reprove her to no avail; Hector and Konrad would shake their heads and smile in a worldly way; Grandfather’s chuckles would grow rattlier and more thick until they burst into gunshot hocks of phlegm, and he would blow his great nose, he would wind his great pocketwatch with vigor to recompose himself.
“So kiss me, my sweet,
And then let us part;
And when I grow too old to dream,
That kiss will live in my heart.”
